An effective 3D meshing approach for fractured rocks

Summary An effective mesh generation algorithm is proposed to construct mesh representations for arbitrary fractures in 3D rock masses. With the development of advanced imaging techniques, fractures in a rock mass can be clearly captured by a high‐resolution 3D digital image but with a huge data set. To reduce the data size, corresponding mesh substitutes are required in both visualization and numerical analysis. Fractures in rocks are naturally complicated. They may meet at arbitrary angles at junctions, which could derive topological defects, geometric errors or local connectivity flaws on mesh models. A junction weight is proposed and applied to distinguish fracture junctions from surfaces by an adequate threshold. We take account of fracture junctions and generate an initial surface mesh by a simplified centroidal Voronoi diagram. To further repair the initial mesh, an innovative umbrella operation is designed and adopted to correct mesh topology structures and preserve junction geometry features. Constrained with the aforementioned surface mesh of fracture, a tetrahedral mesh is generated and substituted for the 3D image model to be involved in future numerical analysis. Finally, we take two fractured rock samples as application examples to demonstrate the usefulness and capability of the proposed meshing approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.